Point & Click: iPhone to the Rescue ?

Developers dust down adventure classics for iPhone and, in turn, drive re-makes and sequels for the PC too

When The Secret Of Monkey Island was announced for the iPhone, it generated much excitement – especially when it became apparent that a new game, Tales Of Monkey Island, was being released for the PC as well. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, with the iPhone causing more and more developers to take a fresh look at their back catalogue. There is, quite simply, a point-and-click revival that includes great gems like Telltale’s new series of Sam & Max episodic content and lots of spankingly fresh IPs such as the indie masterpiece Time Gentlemen, Please! Increasingly, however, the iPhone is playing a greater part, and whereas people were once saying the Nintendo DS was going to save the humble adventure from the abyss, now they are pointing to Apple’s hugely popular device to do the same. And it’s set to have a great effect on the PC market.

Says who? Quite a few people actually. Dan Marshall, creator of Time Gentlemen, Please! believes the resurgence in interest in the Monkey Island reboot and the old LucasArts point-and clicks on Steam are having a positive effect. “People seem to be after some point-and-click action at the moment,” he says, undaunted that his game was released at the same time as the adventuring giants. “A lot of people are winding up at my doorstep as a result.”

Charles Cecil, the brain behind three of the all time point-and-click classics, Lure Of The Temptress, Beneath A Steel Sky and Broken Sword, agrees. The latter has already been ported to the DS and Wii and now BASS has had an airing on the iPhone. Like The Secret Of Monkey Island before it, Beneath A Steel Sky: Remastered has tinkered with the control system to make use of the touch-sensitive nature of the iPhone, but the great gameplay remains intact. Indeed, BASS is much more intuitive and it’s a great introduction for novices to the genre (helped, in no small part, by the context-sensitive help system). But of greater interest (to us PC gamers) is that Revolution Studios is set to bring Remastered to the PC, and work is underway to produce a sequel. “The benefit of producing iPhone games are vast,” he says. “It enables us to take the game to a whole new audience and work on a brand new control system, which makes playing the titles much more intuitive. But it also allows us to build an appetite for the franchises again, gets them back into the public’s consciousness so that we can then go on and progress them, build on the stories and provide fresh experiences.”

All of this marks a huge step forward for the genre. It was, after all, Charles who once commented that point-and-clicks, at least in their traditional sense, were dead. So it proved, with games like Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Grim Fandango being massively overtaken in the popularity stakes by a stream of first-person shooters and role-playing games.
Beneath A Steel Sky: Remastered takes the tale of hope in a dystopian, largely oppressive future and freshens it up. It has a new outro that gives some hints about a future sequel – which we are not going to spoil for you – to see it you really do need to finish it for yourself. It’s a similar path to that trodden by The Secret Of Monkey Island and Broken Sword. Yet it’s not all about the old; Charles is even thinking of producing entirely fresh adventuring IP too.

What is interesting is that Cecil is proposing a special model for the PC – a pay-if-you-like-it model similar to the wheeze by Radiohead and the decision to allow punters to fork out whatever they wanted for Championship Manager 2010. “It could become a model for re-releases of classic games, helping us to gauge an appetite for future versions,” Charles tells us. “Ultimately, there is a lot of excitement surrounding our games and we’d be daft not to consider every possibility.” What the iPhone has in its favour is the accessibility of the App Store, the cheap prices of games – BASS: Remastered will, in line with rivals, cost just £2.99 – and the 70 per cent profit margins. It is also getting more and more people tuned in to downloadable content. The PC versions of Revolution’s new products will most likely be download-only. “By publishing games ourselves, we can build up a better relationship with our audience and it gives us greater commercial and creative freedom and allows us to bring intelligent products to market in the way that we want them,” says Charles. “It’s the most exciting time… People are becoming more accustomed to digital distribution and audiences are more accepting of it.”

And so to that sequel. Talk of a Beneath A Steel Sky 2 has been doing the rounds for years. In 2004, Revolution bought the rights to the domain name Steel-Sky2.com. Other projects took priority, however. “The one thing which I have always been adamant about,” says Charles, “is that we would only write BASS2 if it either equalled the original or surpassed it. And I think we’re now on the right path to doing that.” One thing is for sure: Watchmen comic creator Dave Gibbons is set to work on a sequel. He produced new animated movies for the iPhone version of BASS and his artwork will be used in a follow-up. Gibbons tells us he would like to see the series explore Robert Foster’s origins and create a prequel, looking at how the enclosed city was formed. But a straightforward sequel is not entirely off the agenda. Charles adds: “Dave defined the art style of the original BASS and drew the backgrounds, as well as contributing to the story – it was a successful and really fun collaboration. More recently he drew art for Broken Sword: Director’s Cut, and Beneath A Steel Sky on iPhone. “This is a collaboration that we both plan to build on – we are working together on a number of designs for original adventures and BASS2 is certainly something that we are considering.”